Scenario the First: You get settled in to write, but maybe not 100% feeling it, so you jump on the old Facebooks (just for a second) to see how your cousin Edna is doing after her hernia surgery, and then you see that funny Donald Trump as Grumpy Cat picture, and you're like, "damn, that's funny, gots ta repost that!" and you do, and then you refresh the page twenty times to see notifications of everybody enjoying your faux-funniness as reposter of somebody else's humor, and then...
Oh yeah. Then something pops up, and you just pissed away that writing time. You look up, and it's been over an hour. Pissed away. On Donald Trump as Grumpy Cat.
Scenario the Second: You're actually writing. You're in the groove. But you hit a paragraph, a line, a word, that just...ain't...right. It's a dead thud in your symphony of words. So you edit. And then you go back and rewrite that whole paragraph to fit your edit. Then...dammit. Now you're in a special place called Edit Hell.
So, what's a writer like me, a writer with the attention span of a ferret on Adderal, supposed to do? How do I ensure that, when I sit down to write, I actually write, and not:
- wind up admiring some random Kardashian's butt in yoga pants.
- edit myself into a death-spiral of perfectionism and procrastination?
Meet my little friend, the Alphasmart Neo:
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| I'm adorable, but I'm a dominatrix at keeping you on-task. |
It's a keyboard, and a tiny little screen. Five, maybe six lines of text. Very limited editing tools.
Period.
No browser. No hi-def. No Netflix. A tiny, monochrome LCD screen with a nice, clacky keyboard.
The one I got basically stores keystroke data. You write until you're done writing. Then you USB this bad boy to your laptop/desktop/tablet/skynet and open the text program of your choosing, Word, Libre, Scribus, whatever. Get your cursor blinking like you're about to start writing, and then hit 'SEND' on your little buddy Alpha and -- bloop! --magic writing as Alpha shits out everything you just wrote to the document. Save that doc just like any other, because it is just like any other. Except you wrote it, instead of surfing the interwebs for an hour. Now you have a chunk of written work.
Now you can sink yourself into Edit Hell, because you actually have something there to edit.
It runs on AA batteries; some flavors are rechargeable while others take the kind I buy by the crate at the Dollar Store to keep multiple X-box controllers functional at my house. As long as the batteries have juice, your magnum opus is safe (so go ahead and transfer it right away if you buy cheap batteries like me).
With shipping, mine ran $40 on Amazon.
AlphaNeo on Amazon
